perfect must be in harmony with nature, "and so in it there must, as in an April day, be sunshine, and cloud, and shadow, and the play of children, and the sorrows of the soul, and the house of mourning next to the wedding house, and men must go from one to the other. Thus that grave-digging scene is just and beautiful in its place-is obedient to the law of life, shows us what life truly is, makes us accept its uncertainties, and learn that great lesson-how different are the laws of the construction of this world from what they would be if made by our unlearned art. If out of life we can shake vain and unseemly jests, then out of our play we may shake the clowns and the jesters, who are always there in Shakspere's plays to teach us the lesser side of life, to show us the harmonic whole, and teach us to call nothing common or unclean."*

Murder, adultery, deep drinking and a great want of honour and moral worth is evidenced by most of the characters by whom Halmet is surrounded. The knowledge and power of thought which the young prince possesses is not in unison with the state of society in which he is placed. It is a wild period and the manners and customs are rude and barbaric. From such a state the nature of Hamlet wholly reverts, for by his great thinking he has become more tenderly alive to the finer feelings of humanity, and thus he hath enkindled a deep sensibility and a high state of intelligence which unfits him for the physical action so necessary in such an age.

Hamlet is a work upon which no two writers have wholly agreed, but it is a work the most complete that

*Rev. G. Dawson on Hamlet.

ever has been written.

Human life with all its hopes and aspirations, its joys and sorrows are here displayed, and the reader or the spectator can readily embody them as his own. The villainous king, the easy yielding queen, the hot choleric Laertes, the cool prosaic Horatio, the rude wit of the grave-diggers, the sententious garrulity of the worldly wise, maxim preaching Polonius, the foppery of Osric, the fawning sycophancy of Rosencrantz and Guilderstein, the fair and loving Ophelia, and the warlike Fortinbras, with the pomp and majesty of war, all form a picture of the most varied and animated kind. A picture, in which every shade of thought, the dark perplexities of our being, the endless enquiries and divings in the arcana of Nature, the restless longings, the hopes and fears of another life, are all foreshadowed and dwelt upon. From another world the more forcibly to paint the picture, has Shakspere drawn one of his characters; the grave has been called upon to surrender one of its tenants, and in the ghost of Hamlet's father, we see as it were an herald demanding vengeance upon those who had been guilty of an enormity: a demand which is complied with by accidental means only, and not by a course of justice, which would the more solemnly impress upon the spectators, or reader, the natural result of unbridled passions, but innocent and guilty are alike dragged down in one common ruin, no distinction or difference being made, between the guilty, the less guilty, and those wholly innocent. Nor could the poet have made that distinction, he seeks to represent the world and those who move and have their being therein, to depict the motives which move and govern humanity, and thus holding up "the mirror"

to be true to nature, he could not have made the piece to finish with universal happiness, for it would have been at variance with the law of humanity.* Under all circumstances, is the poet ever faithful to this law, and though in this play, to use the words of Schlegel, "the destiny of humanity is exhibited as a gigantic sphinx, which threatens to precipitate into the abyss of scepticism, all who are unable to solve her dreadful enigmas," we are compelled to acknowledge that truth, fair truth, is here seated on her throne, and that a lesson of the most useful character is laid down for our instruction and admiration.‡

*See illustration D.

+ Schlegel's Dramatic Literature, p. 406.

"This drama is stern. In it truth doubts, sincerity lies. Nothing can be more immense, more subtile. In it man is the world, and the world is Zero. Hamlet, even full of life, is not sure of existence. In this tragedy, which is at the same time a philosophy, everything floats, hesitates, delays, staggers, becomes discomposed, scatters, and is dispersed. Thought is a cloud, will is a vapour, resolution is a crepus cule; (broken light) the action blows each moment in an inverse direction, man is governed by the winds. Overwhelming and vertiginous, (whirling) work, in which is seen the depth of everything, in which thought oscillates only between the king murdered and Yorick buried, and in which what is best realized, is royalty represented by a ghost and mirth represented by a death's head.

Hamlet is the chef d'oeuvre of the tragedy dream.- Victor Hugo on Shakspere, pp. 199, 200.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

(A) "If he had been a man of action, whose firstlings of the heart are those of the hand, he would have struck in the

earliest heat of his revenge. He feels while he questions, that it is not true that he is 'pigeon liver'd, and lacks gall to make oppression bitter;' but he does lack that resolution which 'makes mouths at the invisible event;' he does make, 'I would, wait upon, I will:' he does hesitate and procrastinate and examine his motives, and make sure to his own mind of his justification."-The Psychology of Shakspere, by Dr. Bucknell, p. 67.

"Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity, but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled at last by mere accident to effect his object."-Coleridge's Table Talk, p. 40.

Hamlet "is not a character marked by strength of passion or will, but by refinement of thought and feeling. His ruling passion is to think, not to act, and any vague pretence that flatters this propensity, instantly diverts him from his previous purposes."-Hazlitt's Shakspere Characters, pp. 108, 111.

Hamlet's "irresolution results in no wise exclusively from weakness, but essentially also from conscientiousness and virtue and it is just this subtle combination which renders Hamlet such an essentially tragic character. His doubts as to the certainty of the fact and the legitimacy of revenge, the gentleness of his soul, which unconsciously struggles against the means of vengeance, the bent of his mind to reflect upon the nature and consequences of his deed, and by this means to paralyse his active powers, all these scruples of thinking too precisely on the event,' he himself calls in the warmth of selfblame,

6

"A thought which quartered, hath but one part wisdom, And ever, three parts coward."

Gervinius's Shakspere Commentaries, vol. 11. p. 133.

"The chief thing which strikes us in the character of Hamlet is his irresolution; everything he does is 'sicklied o'er' with doubt and uncertainty; he occupies himself with constant and unsatisfactory meditations upon the great mysteries of life and death; he is in all things sceptical, and in losing his faith in nature, he loses much of his love of it also."-Essay on Hamlet, Shakspere Gallery.

"The character of Hamlet embodies the predominance of the contemplative element over the practical in a mind of the highest order, both intellectually and morally."-W. W. Lloyd's Essay on Hamlet.

"The rise, progress, and consummation of the whole plot of the tragedy of Hamlet, is a consistent theme upon the conflict between determination and irresolution, arising from over reflection; and in nothing throughout the whole scheme of the play is the art of the poet more grandly developed, than in making the vacillation of the hero to turn solely upon that over-reflectiveness of his nature."-Shakspere's Characters, by C. C. Clarke, p. 91.

(B) "Captured by pirates, he is set on shore in Denmark against his will, and although he seems at last to make up his mind to act, nevertheless, no one of the subsequent events is brought about by his own free volition, or according to his own intention."-Ulrici on Shakspere's Dramatic Art, p. 220.

"To me it is clear that Shakspere meant in the present case to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view, the whole piece seems to me to be composed."-Goethe's Wilheim Meister, vol. I. p. 200.

Hamlet "is eaten up with a great woe, which shuts out all sympathy with others, and wanders about on the stage of life like a man who has some task to do greater than he can perform. Destiny has proposed to him a riddle which he cannot solve; and because he cannot, like the Sphinx of old, it devours him."-H. T. Essay on Hamlet, Shakspere's Gallery.